Established in the spring of 1997 and funded largely by the energy and arms
industries, the Project for the New American Century was founded as the
neoconservative think tank whose stated goal was to usher in a “new American
century”.

Having won the cold war and no military threat
to speak of, this group of ideologues created a blueprint for the future
whose agenda was to capitalize upon our surplus of military forces and funds
and forcing American hegemony and corporate privatization throughout the
world.

According to their own document,
Rebuilding America's Defenses their stated goals would never be realized “absent some catastrophic
catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor”. (page 63).

George W Bush, whose political career has been nearly fully funded by the
energy and defense industries was appointed by the Supreme Court after the
disputed election of 2000. Immediately he appointed signatories of PNAC
documents to the top levels of the Whitehouse and Pentagon.

It has now been proven that once Bush had all of his top levels filled by
the PNAC, that our guard against terrorist attacks was let down.

Richard Clarke, whose position as terrorism czar was promoted to a cabinet
level position under Clinton, was subsequently demoted from the cabinet and
reassigned by Bush to other projects. Dick Cheney himself, has said that
Clarke was kept “out of the loop”.

Paul O’Neil, former Secretary of Treasury, has stated that the Bush
administration did not treat Al-Qaeda as an imminent threat.

The Bush administration ignored and denied the existence of a presidential
briefing entitled “Bin Laden determined to attack inside the United Sates”
until it was revealed to the public.

Testifying before the 9-11 commission,
Rice referred to this as an "historical document". We were led to believe
that this was the only warning. It has since come out to the public, that
she was lying. Lying 52 times over. It has now been learned that Condi
didn't disclose that they had, in fact, received
52 warnings in the months
leading up to September 11th.

The Bush administration needed a “new Pearl Harbor” to implement the PNAC
agenda and they let down their guard until it occurred.

The Aftermath

Knowing what we know today, the invasion of Iraq was based on falsehoods and
was an unnecessary and dangerous diversion from the effort to reduce
terrorist attacks on the United States. Muslim anger at the United States is
at an all time high. Iraq posed no threat to us and the process of
containment was working. Most importantly, Iraq is in chaos, on the brink of
civil war, and now a breeding ground for a hundred new Bin Ladens.

The PNAC members of our government told us that it would be “a cake walk”.
That we would be greeted as “liberators”. That we’d see parades in the
streets. Terribly undermanned, our military is in the middle of a quagmire
where only the best case scenario was planned for.

The museums, the hospitals, the munitions depots, the nuclear facilities
were left unprotected at the onset of the invasion. The ministry of oil was
securely guarded.

Who has benefited from all of this at the expense of over a thousand US
soldiers lives and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilian lives?

The very arms
and energy industries that funded the PNAC:

Halliburton, once headed by Vice
President Dick Cheney

Bechtel, once headed by Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld

Trireme, a defense company started by
Deputy Secretary of Defense, Richard Perle shortly before the
invasion

Cheney went to Washington in 1969 to serve as special assistant to
(fellow PNAC member) Donald Rumsfeld in the Office of Economic
Opportunity in the Nixon administration.

Since he and Bush arrived at the White House, Cheney has managed to
accomplish quite a bit. He's met with the heads of oil, gas, and nuclear
power companies, assembled their "wish lists," and turned them into a
new
national Energy Plan.

Cheney's close relations with folks like Ken
Lay of Enron have made this one of the most corporation-friendly
administrations in history.

"Mr. Cheney led Halliburton into the top
ranks of corporate welfare hogs, benefiting from almost $2 billion in
taxpayer-insured loans from the U.S. Export-Import Bank and the Overseas
Private Investment Corp. In the five years before Mr. Cheney joined the
company, it got a measly $100 million in government loans." (1)

Cheney in numbers:

Cheney's 2000 income from Halliburton:
$36,086,635

Increase in government contracts while
Cheney led Halliburton: 91%

Minimum size of "accounting
irregularity" that occurred while Cheney was CEO: $100,000,000 (One
hundred MILLION dollars)

Number of the seven official US "State
Sponsors of Terror" that Halliburton contracted with: 2 out of 7

In a debate with Vice Presidential candidate Joe
Lieberman in 2000, Lieberman noted that Cheney had done well for himself as
CEO of Halliburton.

Cheney responded flatly,

"I can tell you, Joe, the government had
absolutely nothing to do with it."

But even a glance at Cheney's tenure at
Halliburton suggests otherwise.

During his five years as CEO, Cheney nearly doubled the size of
Halliburton's government contracts, totaling a whopping $2.3 billion. He
convinced the Export-Import Bank of the U.S. to lend Halliburton and oil
companies another $1.5 billion, backed by U.S. taxpayers.

As exposed in the
article below, some of these loans went to a Russian company with ties to
drug dealing and organized crime. (2)

Cheney's rule at Halliburton was characterized by a ruthless geopolitical
strategy that put aside political beliefs whenever they were inconvenient.
In a number of cases, Halliburton and its subsidiaries supported or even
ordered human rights violations and broke international laws.

Consider the following examples:

Libyan dictator and suspected anti-U.S.
terrorist Moammar Gadhafi engaged a foreign subsidiary of
Halliburton company Brown & Root to perform millions of dollars
worth of work. According to the Baltimore Sun, Brown & Root was
fined $3.8 million for violating Libyan sanctions. (Although Cheney
wasn't leading Halliburton when these sales started, subsidiaries'
sales to Libya continued throughout his tenure.)

Cheney claimed that he supported the
U.S. sanctions on Iraq, but the Financial Times of London reported
that through foreign subsidiaries and affiliates, Halliburton became
the biggest oil contractor for Iraq, selling more than $73 million
in goods and services to Saddam Hussein's regime. (3)

In Burma, Halliburton joined oil
companies in working on two notorious gas pipelines, the Yadana and
Yetagun. According to an Earth Rights report,

"From 1992 until the present,
thousands of villagers in Burma were forced to work in support
of these pipelines and related infrastructure, lost their homes
due to forced relocation, and were raped, tortured and killed by
soldiers hired by the companies as security guards for the
pipelines. One of Halliburton’s projects was undertaken during
Dick Cheney’s tenure as CEO."

Halliburton is now being investigated by
the Securities and Exchange Commission for Enron-style accounting
practices that took place while Cheney was CEO.

In late August 2001, a Los Angeles Times article
exposed the connections between Cheney's Task Force and Bush's campaign
contributors.

The article described how the final report
adopted verbatim a global warming policy suggested by the U.S. Energy
Association (an energy industry group), how language was altered to favor
Halliburton, and how a company called Peabody Coal and its affiliates gave
more than $900,000 to the Bush campaign and "gained extraordinary access" to
the Task Force. (4)

While the mainstream media mostly continue to cast Bush as the captain of
his ship, hints that Cheney is the dominant figure shaping Washington's
diplomatic policy have become too numerous to ignore.

A recent Washington Post article revealed a most
stunning example of this lopsided state of affairs. According to the Post,
Bush had ordered Cabinet officials not to give any preferential treatment to
Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC) when U.S. forces moved into
Iraq last spring.

But soon after, in flagrant violation of his
directive, the Pentagon flew Chalabi and 600 of his armed followers into
southern Iraq in early April, "with the approval of the vice president."

That was the crowd you saw cheering in the statue toppling photo-op.
(click below image)

It was Cheney's choices that prevailed in the appointment of both cabinet
and sub-cabinet national-security officials, beginning with that of (PNAC
member) Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary.

Not only did Cheney personally intervene to
ensure that Powell's best friend, (PNAC member) Richard Armitage, was
denied the deputy defense secretary position, but he also secured the post
for his own protégé, (PNACmember) Paul Wolfowitz. Moreover, it was
Cheney who insisted that the ultra-unilateralist (PNAC co-founder) John
Bolton be placed in a top State Department arms job – a position from
which Bolton has consistently pursued policies that run counter to Powell's
own views.

Cheney's chief of staff and national security adviser, (PNAC member) I.
Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a Washington lawyer and Wolfowitz protégé, is
considered a far more skilled and experienced bureaucratic and political
operator than Rice. With several of his political allies on Rice's own staff
– , including deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley and
Middle East director (PNAC member) Elliott Abrams – Libby "is able to
run circles around Condi," noted a former NSC official.

According to retired intelligence officers, Cheney and Libby played the
decisive role in distorting the intelligence used to make Bush's case for
war. Libby made frequent trips to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
in the run-up to the Iraq war, pressuring analysts in include questionable
evidence supplied by the INC and Rumsfeld-led hawks.

More recently, it was Cheney who led the effort to deny Powell the authority
to negotiate a new UN Security Council resolution that would have reduced
the Pentagon's control over the political transition in Iraq, even though
the president initially approved such a deal.

For an extensive briefing on Halliburton and Cheney's foreign policy impact,
check out this well-written and thorough report (5)

Cheney made $36 million at Halliburton in 2000 alone. Thesmokinggun.com has
his tax returns to prove it (6)

Donald H. RumsfeldJanuary 17, 2004Donald H. Rumsfeld was sworn in as the 21st Secretary of Defense on
January 20, 2001. Before assuming his present post, the former Navy pilot
had also served as the 13th Secretary of Defense, White House Chief of
Staff, U.S. Ambassador to NATO, U.S. Congressman and chief executive officer
of two Fortune 500 companies.

But most importantly, he was a wrestling
champion at Princeton famous for using the fireman's carry as his finishing
move. (1) (4) Legend has it that Henry Kissinger describes
Rumsfeld as "the most ruthless man he ever met."

He came to Washington, DC in 1957, during the Eisenhower Administration.

As a director for Gulfstream Aerospace, his stock in the company reportedly was valued at $11
million when the company was acquired by defense contractor General Dynamics
in 1999. But Rumsfeld has scrupulously avoided any direct dealings with
defense companies, either serving on boards or purchasing stock, apparently
to avoid the appearance of impropriety in case he was asked to fill a
defense department post again. (3)

Five years before Saddam Hussein’s now infamous 1988 gassing of the Kurds, a
key meeting took place in Baghdad that would play a significant role in
forging close ties between Saddam Hussein and Washington. It happened at a
time when Saddam was first alleged to have used chemical weapons. The
meeting in late December 1983 paved the way for an official restoration of
relations between Iraq and the US, which had been severed since the 1967
Arab-Israeli war.

With the Iran-Iraq war escalating, President Ronald Reagan dispatched his
Middle East envoy, a former secretary of defense, to Baghdad with a
hand-written letter to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and a message that
Washington was willing at any moment to resume diplomatic relations.

That envoy was Donald Rumsfeld.

Throughout the period that Rumsfeld was Reagan’s Middle East envoy, Iraq was
frantically purchasing hardware from American firms, empowered by the White
House to sell. The buying frenzy began immediately after Iraq was removed
from the list of alleged sponsors of terrorism at the Whitehouse's behest in
1982.

According to a February 13, 1991 Los Angeles
Times article:

“First on Hussein's shopping list was
helicopters - he bought 60 Hughes helicopters and trainers with little
notice. However, a second order of 10 twin-engine Bell "Huey"
helicopters, like those used to carry combat troops in Vietnam, prompted
congressional opposition in August, 1983... Nonetheless, the sale was
approved.”

In 1984, according to The LA Times, the State
Department - in the name of “increased American penetration of the extremely
competitive civilian aircraft market” - pushed through the sale of 45 Bell
214ST helicopters to Iraq. The helicopters, worth some $200 million, were
originally designed for military purposes.

The New York Times later reported that Saddam
“transferred many, if not all [of these helicopters] to his military.”

In 1988, Saddam’s forces attacked Kurdish civilians with poisonous gas from
Iraqi helicopters and planes. U.S. intelligence sources told The LA Times in
1991, they “believe that the American-built helicopters were among those
dropping the deadly bombs.”

In response to the gassing, sweeping sanctions were unanimously passed by
the US Senate that would have denied Iraq access to most US technology. The
measure was killed by the republican White House. (2)

As a result of the openings created by Rumsfeld's diplomatic triumphs, U.S.
companies were recruited and encouraged, both covertly and overtly, to ship
poisonous chemicals and biological agents to Iraq, by the administrations of
both Reagan and George Bush Sr.

Care packages to Saddam included sample
strains of anthrax and bubonic plague, and components which would be used to
develop nerve poisons like sarin gas and ricin.

That's where Rummy's connections to major
pharmaceutical and technology companies came into play. (4)

13 Aug 1996

Tom Brokaw, taped from a satellite
transmission that he did not know was being broadcast announces to the
world "Rummy [Donald Rumsfeld] used to get even with guys in the White
House by leaking stuff to [Dan] Rather that didn't have any basis in
fact."

The Bechtel connection

Bechtel has long been intertwined with
Republican foreign policymakers, globally and in Iraq. It turns out that
many of today's war hawks spent a couple years in the 1980s trying to
get Saddam to sign an oil pipeline contract. Even though Saddam was
gassing Iranians at the same time, people like Donald Rumsfeld had some
quality face-time with the "evil dictator" pitching a plan that would
benefit, beyond all other interests, Bechtel - and, potentially,
Hussein.

Rumsfeld flew to Baghdad, twice, as Reagan's special envoy. According to
newly-available documents, a lot of his business was nothing more than
advancing Bechtel's business. Following a script crafted by
then-Secretary of State George Shultz - who went directly from the CEO
seat at Bechtel into the Reagan team - he pitched the idea of building
an oil pipeline from Iraq to Jordan in December 1983.

But it was all for naught.

Two years after Rumsfeld broached the plan
with Saddam, the dictator finally rejected Bechtel's proposal. He found
better pipeline deals involving Turkey and Saudi Arabia, and thought the
U.S. company doubled the actual construction cost.

While this signaled the end of U.S.-Iraqi oil diplomacy, the Reagan and
first Bush administrations settled into a constructive engagement
routine with Saddam. Bechtel signed contracts with Saddam in 1988, after
"Chemical Ali" gassed thousands of Kurds, to build a huge dual-use
chemical plant on the outskirts of Baghdad.

Saddam named Bechtel as one of the corporate
suppliers of technology for chemical weapons in its U.N. declaration
last year. Construction stopped only after Saddam's troops invaded
Kuwait, and his police held Bechtel employees in confinement.

Resigned as chair of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board on 3/27/03
due to conflict of interest scandal,
see New Yorker, 3/27/03.

Member Defense Policy Board to present [01.21.0.4]

Richard Perle (ISRAEL)

Assistant Sec. of Defense under Reagan
"He was investigated in 1980s for possible ties to the Israeli
espionage case involving Jonathan Jay Pollard."

Co-founder, Project for the New American Century

Former Director of Jerusalem Post

An FBI summary of a 1970 wiretap recorded Perle discussing
classified information with someone at the Israeli embassy. He came
under fire in 1983 when newspapers reported he received substantial
payments to represent the interests of an Israeli weapons company.

1996 Co-authored "A New Strategy For Defending the Realm" Sponsored
by the Institute for Advanced Studies written for Likud Prime
Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu

Board of Advisers of The Jewish Institute For National Security
Affairs to present [01.21.04]

After graduating college and a short stint in working for the fiercely
anti-Communist Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson he went to work for a private
military-consulting firm.

The following year he was appointed Assistant
Secretary of Defense in the presidential administration of Ronald Reagan.
During the presidential campaign of George W. Bush, Perle served as a
foreign policy advisor.

A veteran Washington insider, Perle has on occasion been accused of being an
Israeli agent of influence.

"He came under fire in 1983 when newspapers
reported he received substantial payments to represent the interests of
an Israeli weapons company. Perle denied conflict of interest, insisting
that, although he received payment for these services after he had
assumed his position in the Defense Department, he was between
government jobs when he worked for the Israeli firm." (1)

Like many of Bush's top Whitehouse and pentagon
officials, he's a war profiteer who consulted for the very companies that
profited from the illegal invasion of Iraq and was one of the most ardent
supporters of the invasion.

Rummy consulted for Bechtel, Cheney, of course,
had Halliburton.

The Carlyle Group had Bush Sr. on their board
and Perle worked for Trireme, a venture capital firm and defense contractor
similar to The Carlyle Group. As pentagon adviser, Richard N. Perle
coauthored an opinion piece this summer praising a Pentagon plan to lease
tanker aircraft - which had the potential to steer billions of dollars to
Boeing Co. - 16 months after Boeing committed to invest $20 million with
Trireme.

Perle also serves on the board of directors of Hollinger International Inc.,
the media company whose chief executive, Conrad Black, resigned last month
after disclosures that he and other executives collected millions of dollars
payments the company's audit committee determined were unauthorized.
Hollinger disclosed last month that it has invested $2.5 million in Trireme
Associates.

A special committee of Hollinger's board is examining that
investment and others involving company insiders, a source close to
Hollinger said. (2)

Trireme also created
International Advisors Inc., a lobbying firm whose main
client is Turkey. Henry Kissinger is a Trireme adviser, and Perle is a
managing partner. (3) Kissinger, who was forced to resign as head of the
independent commission to investigate the 9/11 attacks, has been using his
influence to try to keep the Saudis calm during the buildup to war. New
Yorker investigative journalist, Sy Hersh, criticized Perle's relationship
with Trireme.

The award winning journalist wrote in the March
17th issue of the New Yorker:

"There is no question that Perle believes
that removing Saddam from power is the right thing to do. At the same
time, he has set up a company that may gain from a war." (4)

"Sy Hersh is the closest
thing American journalism has to a terrorist," Perle told Wolf Blitzer.
(5)

Like many of Bush's top Whitehouse and pentagon officials Perle is involved
with the Iran-Contra felons who lied to congress, and betrayed the country
with impunity.

John Poindexter

Elliott Abrams

Otto Reich

Richard Armitage

John
Negroponte

Mitch Daniels...

...are all Iran-Contra alumni who have been
appointed to high level government jobs by Bush Jr.

Where does Perle fit in?
Meet Adnan Khashoggi.

During the Reagan Administration, Khashoggi was one of
the middlemen between Oliver North, in the White House, and the mullahs in
Iran in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal.

Khashoggi is still brokering. In January of this
year, he arranged a private lunch, in France, to bring together Harb Saleh
al-Zuhair, a Saudi industrialist whose family fortune includes extensive
holdings in construction, electronics, and engineering companies throughout
the Middle East, and Richard N. Perle, the chairman of the Defense Policy
Board.

As stated before, Perle is a managing partner in the venture-capital company
called Trireme Partners L.P. Trireme’s main business, according to a
two-page letter that one of its representatives sent to Khashoggi last
November, is to invest in companies dealing in technology, goods, and
services that are of value to homeland security and defense. (6)

Four members of the Defense Policy Board told me that the board, which met
most recently on February 27 and 28, had not been informed of Perle’s
involvement in Trireme.

One board member, upon being told of Trireme and Perle’s meeting with Khashoggi, exclaimed,

“Oh, get out of here. He’s the chairman! If
you had a story about me setting up a company for homeland security, and
I’ve put people on the board with whom I’m doing that business, I’d be
had” (7)

The wide-ranging Perle even finds himself
involved in Total Information Awareness technology. He was listed as a
speaker at a March 13 Washington press briefing on 'data mining,' the use of
computer technology to sift out patterns from electronic communications. A
fellow Pentagon official, Admiral John M. Poindexter an Iran-Contra felon,
spurred a political firestorm with his TIA plans.

Congress forbade such technology to be used
against Americans.

Perle's tentacles reached into the press, too, which he manipulated through
careful leaks of sensitive information. He was said to frequently use Evans
and Novak's column to push his agenda and to punish his foes.

Later, Perle
would add George Will and the Wall Street Journal's Robert Bartley to his
list of friends in the media.

Could Perle have been the "high ranking
official" who leaked the identity of CIA agent Valerie Palme to Novak in
retaliation for her husband's public disproval of Bush's lies leading us to
invade Iraq? (8)

"Basically, Perle is serving as the
ventriloquist's dummy and is making the administration's case publicly
but in a deniable fashion," says John Pike, a defense policy expert and
an old Perle foe. "Donald Rumsfeld adamantly refuses to talk about
blowing up Iraq. Richard Perle talks about very little else."